A question that surely a lot of us have wondered about.

Which one of these programs produces the best quality MPEG-2 streams for DVD?

I currently have access to Compressor 3 and Encore CS4. What I can tell you right now is that I'm encoding a file (a QT ProRes PAL video file) in Encore right now, it has taken about 5 hours, and the same file has been encoded in Compressor in just 2 hours. Both programs set to the maximum quality, and working in the same Mac Pro computer, so if time is proportional to quality, Encore should win hands on!

Any comments, suggestions, personal experiences, extracorporeal experiences (... oh, wait!) about MPEG-2 encoding are welcome on this thread!

Both of them will produce decent results if you aren't doing any scaling (such as HD to SD), with compressor possibly having a very slight edge over Encore.

However both programs produce absolute garbage when doing down conversions, even with maximum settings for everything (Encore having a slight edge over Compressor when 'Maximum Render Quality' is turned on).

I’ve followed various workflows in an attempt to get decent looking SD DVD from HDV footage. It’s relative as some claim the following FCP workflows can result in excellent output. I’ve generally found it didn’t look as good as a SD end-to-end workflow. Whilst more detail might be resolved, jaggies/diagonals are noticeable compressing HDV pixels into SD.

1. Copy & past HDV to SD timeline (bit a of a hassle, mucks up my layered PSD slides which have to replaced directly on the SD timeline)
2. Import HDV over FW to Pro Res, QT Export  Pro Res resize (only) in Compressor, then reimport the resized Pro Res into Compressor to encode
3. As above but no separate resize step.
4. As above but export HDV to Pro Res from FCP timeline
5. Export HDV to Compressor

No. 2 gives the best, but I reiterate, titles especially look worse than SD. So these nice HVRZ5/Z7P cameras are used shooting HDV to tape and DVCAM to CF the latter from which I edit.